Amish parents and schools can’t force New York to recognize a religious-based exemption to its vaccine mandate for schoolchildren, a federal appeals court said Tuesday.
It’s the second time the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit has considered the case, having previously affirmed a lower court’s 2024 decision dismissing allegations that the state’s elimination of the mandate’s religious exemption violates the plaintiffs’ First and 14th Amendment free-exercise rights. The US Supreme Court sent it back to the Second Circuit after ruling, in a separate case, that a Maryland school system likely violated parents’ constitutional rights by using LGBTQ+-inclusive books without notifying them.
That ruling didn’t change the result here, the court said in a unsigned opinion. The justices decided that the Maryland school officials concealed a matter central to their child’s identity and upbringing from them, giving them no say in it. The New York provision did neither—it didn’t conceal anything from the parents or displace any part of their authority over a child’s religious upbringing, the Second Circuit said.
New York was only the second state to adopt vaccination requirements for children entering public schools. The state originally recognized both religious and health exemptions, but repealed the religious exemption after experiencing a measles outbreak in 2018-2019 that lawmakers determined was caused by a high concentration of unvaccinated children with religious exemptions in the same schools.
The Second Circuit refused to revive the religious exemption, saying the mandate was a neutral law of general applicability supported by the state’s rational interest in curbing the spread of contagious diseases. It applied to all schoolchildren—except those who qualified for the health exemption—and didn’t target or prohibit religious practices. There was no indication that religious bias motivated the religious exemption’s repeal.
